Sometimes with CitiBike, racks are completely empty when you need a bike.

Yet somehow, after years of hype and growing popularity, the city's vaunted Citi Bike system has ground to a halt.

It's unclear if it will collapse, like Seattle's system just did, or merely stagger along as a boutique amenity for Manhattan and hipster Brooklyn. But one thing is clear: the dream of a city-wide two-wheeled, dependable, low-cost, high-enjoyment mass transit system is on hold, stymied by lazy politicians, expensive infrastructure, stubborn community leaders, outdated fealty to car culture, and a rejection of competition from innovative new dockless systems that are dying to fill the CitiBike vacuum.

How did we get here

Bike rental was once on a glide path. Since the earliest days of the Bloomberg administration, the city has been on a bike-lane-painting spree, adding roughly 500 miles to the cycling network, which includes some protected lanes and better infrastructure. That infrastructure pales by comparison to what is freely handed over to drivers, but it's a start.

CitiBike joined the fray with much hype in 2013 — and has been embraced widely. That first year, with just 6,000 bikes in a system covering part of Manhattan and an even smaller part of Brooklyn, CitiBike boasted nearly 5.8 million trips. By last year, the system grew to 10,000 bikes — with a few more neighborhoods thrown in — and riders took 14 million trips.

CitiBikes sometimes has ample bikes — but sometimes there’s no place to park the bike you’re on.

(Rose Abuin/New York Daily News)

Skeptics will say that no one cares about stupid little bikes, but skeptics are wrong. Bike rental is a popular and fast-growing form of mass transit in this country, accounting for 88 million trips since 2010. Every year, more people use such systems, which now number close to five dozen nationwide. In 2010, such systems handled 320,000 trips. Last year, they handled 30 million.

CitiBike is the largest system in the country. But it won't remain so if it doesn't grow. And right now, it's not growing.

(Full disclosure: I own an annual membership in CitiBike, which I bought with my own money, and I use the system all the time. I find that it mostly works, except during rush hours when racks suddenly end up empty. Since CitiBike has a monopoly on service, it should function like a utility such as tap water or electricity. But it sometimes lets me down.)

(Another full disclosure: I don't like the widely used term "bike share," which suggests that members of the public are allowing their fellow citizens to use their bikes. CitiBike and other systems are, more accurately, bike rental, so that is the term I will use in this investigation.)

Who's to blame for the stalled CitiBike expansion?

There are plenty of villains to go around:

Motivate: The company that operates CitiBike and controls about 63% of rentable cycles nationwide is tethered to a docking system that costs more to run than newer dockless systems. What was cutting edge just a few years ago is now an albatross undermining further expansion of the system. (Indeed, Seattle scrapped its dock-based system earlier this year and is about to dole out permits to dockless systems.) Annual CitiBike memberships now cost $163, up from $100 in 2013. And every time the company wants to put a dock somewhere, the somewhere pushes back.

The de Blasio administration: The mayor loves his SUV ride from Gracie Mansion to his Park Slope gym, but he has no intention of putting public money into a clean form of commuting being used by tens of thousands of people riding millions of miles. No other form of mass transit has more bang for the buck than bike rental — yet the mayor is doing nothing to help. A source told me that the administration initially dangled $12 million — a pittance — during negotiations earlier this year, but that money has vanished from the current discussions. Why?

The big knock on dockless systems is that the bikes can pile up — and in China, that means literally.

(Gregor Fischer/Gregor Fischer/picture-alliance/)

So-called community leaders: Community Boards often fight the location of CitiBike docks in their neighborhoods, ironically citing the very congestion that more cycling alleviates. If anything, such horse-and-buggy thinking reveals the need for community board reform, as many boards have a knee-jerk (jerk being the operative word) inability to embrace the future. (Note to self: It's time to do a full investigation of why the racial, ethnic and class makeup of so many community boards is completely disconnected from the actual racial, ethnic and class makeup of said communities.)

Is there a solution?

Venture capital money is pouring into companies that have developed dockless, smartphone-enabled bike rental systems that could be deployed at a moment's notice. Companies such as Spin, Social Bicycles, Zagster, Limebike and others versions of this simple system: users download an app and then track the locations of available bikes on their cellphones. If a bike is available, purchase an access code — typical rides are $1 for every half hour — unlock the bike and go. When the user parks the bike, it again shows as available to other users.

Another advantage? You can leave the bike anywhere, which eliminates CitiBike's notorious problems with docks that are either empty when you want to ride home or too full to receive your bike at the end of your ride. It also lets you make it all the way to your destination without having to worry where the CitiBike dock is.

It's like the bike rental equivalent of Uber — a disruptive force that entered marketplaces without warning, blowing up everything until cities drafted new regulations to get everything back under control again. Venture capitalists like the influential Adreessen Horowitz see bike rental the Next Big Thing. And the funding is helping: About one-third of the nation's bike rental systems now feature the so-called smart bikes — up from exactly zero in 2013.

Supporters of dockless systems say that they have no intention of following Uber's model — and tracking systems on-board every bike will ensure that we don't end up with the Great Wall of Chinese Bikes at every subway station.

Limebike is one of the dockless systems that wants to enter New York.

(Tim Mena)

"Those dystopian pictures from China came about because those companies were operating with low-tech bikes," said Ryan Rzepecki, a former city Transportation Department official who is now the CEO of the Brooklyn-based Social Bicycles, which operates systems many small cities, campuses and New Orleans. "But we will track the location of every bike and rebalance the system so those kinds of pileups never happen."

Other companies interested in the New York market made the same promise. And they also promised to adhere to CitiBike's standards — which require system maintenance, bike repairs, rebalancing and other New York necessities. Say what you will about Motivate, but at least the company knows what all that costs; these newcomers with their fancy bikes and investor-friendly websites, do not.

"CitiBike is pretty cool, but its expensive infrastructure and technology have allowed it to fall behind its intended purpose," said James Moore, director of market growth for the San Francisco-based Spin. "CitiBike is not a broken system, but we could compliment it by providing service in currently underserved areas — and do so more effectively."

Moore and his dockless comrades cite their on-board data as the difference-maker because the more rides that are logged, the more city officials will know exactly who is using bike rental and where he or she is going. Current CitiBike technology doesn't tell us where the user started or finished his trip.

What Gersh's conclusion?

The de Blasio administration wants bike rental on the cheap, and all potential bike commuters are paying the price for that. Since it started, the city has not put any money into CitiBike — not on the infrastructure itself, nor to subsidize the cost of memberships. Our CitiBike system was on the verge of bankruptcy once before, before Motivate reorganized it in 2014. But the company's books aren't public, so I have no idea whether it is losing or making money with revenues coming from the licensing deal with CitiBank and the annual fees from its 100,000-plus members.

Worse, Motivate still has to reimburse the city for $1 million in parking revenue that is supposedly lost because of CitiBike docks taking up curbside places for cars. So not only is the city of New York not subsidizing bike mass transit, it's actually charging cyclists in lieu of drivers. And don't forget, every form of mass transit is subsidized by government. And it's particularly ironic that the de Blasio administration is starving CitiBike after recently hyping a new ferry service to the Rockaways that will serve far fewer riders than CitiBike, yet costs the city about $6 per ride in subsidies.

Ryan Rzepecki, CEO of Social Bicycles, thinks a dockless system could be a boon to the city and compliment the existing CitiBike.

I asked Motivate to complain about that, but the company officials would not comment for this story, saying only that Motivate prefers to negotiate behind the scenes rather than in the press. I also repeatedly called Councilman Ydanis Rodriguez, who chairs the Transportation Committee and is said to be holding discussions with Motivate and other bike rental companies. He didn't call me back, either — though I'm not sure if he's dodging or if his office is merely incompetent. (UPDATE! After this story was posted, Rodriguez agreed to appear on my radio show, Brooklyn Paper Radio, on Friday, June 9 at 4 p.m. But then he bailed.)

I also asked the dockless companies why they think they'll be successful with their financing model — $1 per ride is an industry standard, though some companies offer discounts for pre-purchasing multiple rides — but wasn't fully convinced that these companies even know how expensive it is to supply a city with high-tech bikes, and maintain and rebalance them.

"We're confident we can do it" won't dispel many people's doubts. But the city could simply write strict regulations and let the dockless systems give it a try. The only losers would be the venture capitalists who are pouring money into the largely untested system. But the potential upside for the winners — the riding public — would be huge.

Bottom line: Secret, backroom deals aren't the best way to create a public transit system, so I'll continue to try to crack open the window for our readers. That's why I have repeatedly asked the New York City Department of Transportation these questions:

1. What is the city offering Motivate in order to expand CitiBike into Phase III?

2. What will Phase III consist of?

Spin, an Austin-based company, also wants into the New York market.

(Spin)

3. Will the city continue to require Motivate to pay for lost parking fees to site its bikes?

4. Is the city holding any discussions with additional bike rental systems?

5. If so, which companies?

6. If not, why not, given that dockless bike share does seem to be increasingly utilized by other, albeit smaller, cities?

The city continues to ignore my request for legitimate information, a bad move, given that voters don't like when the people's business is conducted in secret.

When I get the answers to the above questions, I'll hand them over to the decision makers: you.